Manager, Applied Research

Are you excited about working at the forefront of applied research in an industry setting? Thomson Reuters Labs in Canada is seeking scientists with a passion for solving problems using state-of-the-art information retrieval, natural language processing and generative AI.

What does Thomson Reuters Labs do? We experiment, we build, we deliver. We support the organization and our customers through applied research in natural language processing and informational retrieval. We innovate collaboratively with product and domain experts to identify compelling solutions at the intersection of user needs and technical feasibility. Our team in Labs Legal Tech is designing the next generation of Legal Technology globally. We drive AI innovation for Thomson Reuters’ LegalTech Products and features, including CoCounsel Core, CoCounsel Drafting, Practical Law, HighQ, Legal Tracker, Document Intelligence, Contract Express, Due Diligence, and others.

**About the Role**:
As a Manager, Applied Research in Labs, you will be part of a global cross-functional team of experts. We hire specialists across a variety of AI research areas, as well as Engineering and Design, to drive the company’s digital transformation. TR Labs is known for consistently delivering AI products that and serve Thomson Reuters customers in new and exciting ways. This opportunity combines hands-on project work as well as project and people leadership.

As a Manager of Applied Scientist, you will:

- Lead a high performing team of applied researchers throughout the full research and product development life cycle from ideation and PoC through to production scaling and feedback driven iteration
- Contribute to hands-on delivery on important projects
- Develop in-depth knowledge of customer problems, workflows and data. Identify state of the art technology relevant to TR products and leverage them to create value for TR customers
- Translate complex business problems into projects with clearly defined scope and objectives, and be accountable for timely, well-managed deliverables
- Provide input and insights to the business and Labs leadership on long-term AI strategy
- Share information, value diverse ideas, and partner effectively with colleagues in a cross-functional team
- Mentor and coach scientists and engineers on best practices and fostering a culture of continuous learning, innovation, and collaboration
- Maintain scientific and technical expertise in one or more relevant areas as demonstrated through product deliverables, published research, and creating intellectual property
- Be a proactive communicator who is excited to share your work. You will be articulate and compelling in describing ideas to both technical and non-technical audiences. You will help lead the way in the adoption of AI across the enterprise.

**About You**:
You’re a fit for the role of Manager of Applied Scientist if your background includes:

- PhD in a relevant discipline or master’s plus a comparable level of experience
- Demonstrable ability to mentor and coach colleagues as well as at least 2 years of line management experience
- Solid software engineering skills for prototyping and ensuring well-managed software delivery
- Experience as a technical leader, scoping, prioritizing, coordinating and guiding the work of others
- Experience collaborating with Product, Engineering and other business stakeholders in an agile manner to demonstrate value and iterate with customer feedback

**Technical Qualifications**:

- Solid understanding of classic ML techniques used for NLP problems
- Solid understanding of DL approaches used for NLP tasks such as transformer-based models
- Working understanding of inner workings of large language models
- Experience working on text heavy NLP projects
- Practical experience using generative AI technologies (prompt engineering, in-context learning, chain-of-thoughts, prompt optimization, auto-evaluation, function calling, controlled generation, etc.)
- Practical experience using RAG frameworks, pre-training/fine-tuning language models, and data curation/generation for training/fine-tuning language models,
- Proficiency in Python, Git, AWS, Azure for remote model development and deployment

**Preferred Qualifications**:

- Prior work on search and question answering from large corpora and/or long document summarization
- Publications at relevant venues such as ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, NeurIPS, ICLR, SIGIR, ICML, KDD or similar conferences and venues

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**What’s in it For You?**
- **Hybrid Work Model**:We’ve adopted a flexible hybrid working environment (2-3 days a week in the office depending on the role) for our office-based roles while delivering a seamless experience that is digitally and physically connected.
- **Flexibility & Work-Life Balance**:Flex My Way is a set of supportive workplace policies designed to help manage personal and professional responsibilities, whether caring for family, giving back to the community, or finding time t